Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture is a practical hands-on instruction manual for enterprise architects. This book prepares you to better engage IT, management, and business users by equipping you with the tools and knowledge you need to address the most common enterprise architecture challenges. You will come away with a pragmatic understanding of and approach to enterprise architecture and actionable ideas to transform your enterprise. Experienced enterprise architect James V. Luisi generously shares life cycle architectures, transaction path analysis frameworks, and more so you can save time, energy, and resources on your next big project.

As an enterprise architect, you must have relatable frameworks and excellent communication skills to do your job. You must actively engage and support a large enterprise involving a hundred architectural disciplines with a modest number of subject matter experts across business, information systems, control systems, and operations architecture. They must achieve their mission using the influence of ideas and business benefits expressed in simple terms so that any audience can understand what to do and why. Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture gives you the tools to accomplish your goals in less time with fewer resources.

Expand your Enterprise Architecture skills so you can do more in less time with less money with the priceless tips presented

Understand the cost of creating new Enterprise Architecture disciplines and contrast those costs to letting them go unmanaged

Includes 10 life cycle architectures so that you can properly assess the ROI of performing activities such as outsourcing, insourcing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and more

I don't usually write reviews but I made a special exception in this case. My money has been lost but if I can save at least one person from throwing away hard earned salary on this shoddy work, I am obligated to do so.

I came across "Pragmatic Architecture" in connection with a search for Malcolm Chisholm who wrote the forward. Malcolm Chisholm has a style and authorship which is powerful, insightful, and cogent. Much to my disappointment, this book achieves the extreme opposite of those attributes.

In explanation, allow me to say that this is not simply a case where one reads a well framed argument and disagrees with the author's ideas. Rather, this book lacks the basic spelling, grammar and structure of a first year student at university. Ideas are not engaged but are instead clumsily avoided by the author.

Each chapter contains pages and pages of unsorted and undefined lists of terms. The author then poses questions on topic spaces that he never intends to answer or address. The author occasionally engages in musings on random unrelated topics. At one point the author declares a "new" prime number which he magnanimously names after himself. Like every other topic in the long rambling lists, this declaration is not supported by any evidence, argument, or facts.

The only mercy the author provides the reader is: the 70% of the book that is unsorted lists is easy to skip over. I appreciated this small mercy as I suffered through chapter after chapter trying to find anything that would remotely justify the purchase price. That justification never came. Instead I was left staring at sentences like "Let's being with 'R'" with bewilderment.

In fairness to the author, the book reads so badly, I am honestly left wondering if Morgan Kauffman accidentally published the author's notes instead of the book itself. This just seems a much more reasonable explanation for how unbelievably bad this book is. Clearly there was no editor review as basic spelling, grammar and formatting are lacking. The publisher clearly shares blame here as they either published the wrong draft or they allowed this author's bizarre and intellectually barren work to slip through the cracks.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone unless it is as example of how not to write a book on Architecture. I will seriously consider my purchase before I buy a book from Malcolm Chisholm or Morgan Kaufman again.

I had high hopes for this book, but they were sadly disappointed. Although it names many fields of enterprise architecture, for me it fails to offer any unified framework within which to approach them, and just didn't deliver any useful value for me. It may for others, but I would not feel able to recommend it based on my reading.

The format for each section is the same, starting with a very brief abstract, and then a long list of "keywords", often covering several pages. This is then followed by subsections with further long lists of questions that need to be taken into account, or the author's definitions of various elements in the domain. Occasionally these are interspersed with descriptions covering a page or two of topics that seem to have caught the author's fancy.

Some of these diversions raised more than an eyebrow with me at least - for example the diversion into a wholly new kind of "prime number" that the author has named after himself, which neither accords with the actual definition of prime numbers as used by the rest of the world, nor appears to be of any use. It rather left me at a loss as to what it had to do with enterprise architecture. (At one point I ended up scanning the book to see how many more of these rather eccentric monologues there were, because at least they were entertaining and made a break from the list format used elsewhere...)

I had hoped for a useful survey of the field, if not a structure I could use with my team (I currently manage a team of Enterprise Architects, and have performed the role itself for a number of years). Sadly I emerged from reading "Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture" little the wiser about any of the topics, and without a useful reference that I could share with others about how to actually perform the role. Perhaps it will be useful as a set of checklists for some topics, but beyond that, I can't recommend it.